The present disclosure relates to a cell analysis apparatus and a cell analysis method capable of determining whether or not a cell colony has formed.
The demand for biomedical apparatuses and biotechnology for rapidly diagnosing various human diseases has recently increased. Therefore, the development of experimental apparatuses and devices capable of providing diagnostic results for specific diseases within a relatively short period of time, diagnoses previously only able to be performed in a hospital or a research laboratory over a long period of time, has been actively conducted.
In order to develop new drugs and tests to determine the stability of such new drugs, it is essential to observe a reaction between the new drug (that is, a medicine) and cells. In general, a reaction experiment between a drug and cells is performed using a culture dish, or the like.
In general, whether or not cells respond to a drug is determined through changes in the sizes of cells. For example, cells actively responding to the drug form a single cell colony. In addition, a cell colony in which cells respond suitably to the drug has a significant size as compared to cells that do not respond to the drug or a cell colony in which cells do not respond suitably to the drug. Therefore, in the case of measuring a size of the cell or cell colony, efficacy of the corresponding drug for cells may be determined.
Meanwhile, cells may be freely positioned in a culture medium. For example, a proliferation space and a proliferation position of cells are not limited to a specific amount of space and a specific position in the culture medium. Therefore, in the case in which a plurality of cells proliferate in the culture medium, a plurality of cells may be overlapped with each other in a vertical or in a horizontal direction. In this case, since the plurality of cells may be misunderstood as being a single cell or a cell colony, reliability of results in analyzing drug efficacy may be deteriorated.
Particularly, in the case of performing three dimensional cell culturing in an extra-cellular matrix (ECM), drying the resultant cellular structure to form a two dimensional cell surface, and then analyzing the two dimensional cell surface, an overlapping phenomenon of the cell colony may be further increased, thereby significantly deteriorating reliability of the classification of cell colonies.
Therefore, a cell analysis apparatus and a cell analysis method capable of significantly decreasing a measurement error due to the overlapping phenomenon as described above should be developed.